Half a Billion Dollars Left in a Week. None of It Was Missing.

The unpopular decision was survivable. The sentence that let someone else take the blame for it was not.

You have paid a bill at an AXS machine. Utilities. School fees. A traffic fine.

In February 2025 that changed. A Singapore fintech started paying you air miles for it.

Three weeks later they switched it off.

What followed took half a billion dollars out of the company. About 40% of everything it held.

Nobody lost their money.

Here's what I didn't know. The man it happened to had spent his career building the opposite thing.

Walter de Oude is a South African actuary. He ran HSBC's insurance business here for seven years. Then he was offered more. He left. Three years asking MAS for a licence.

In 2017 he got one. Singapore Life. The first new local life insurer licensed here since 1970.

Forty-seven years.

In March 2024, Sumitomo Life bought the whole thing. S$4.6 billion.

Four months later: Chocolate Finance.

It is not a bank. It holds a capital markets services licence.

Park your cash. Target 3.3% on the first S$20,000.

The clever part was never the yield.

Take out up to S$20,000 in a day. It lands instantly.

Behind the scenes, selling those fund units takes three to six business days. Chocolate fronted the gap. Out of its own pocket.

That was the product. Not the interest. The speed.

Then came the miles.

On 11 February, Chocolate partnered with HeyMax. Two Max Miles per dollar on virtually everything.

And AXS bills. Nobody had seen that before.

Singaporeans read the terms.

On an AXS bill there is no merchant fee to split. Chocolate was buying those miles and getting nothing back.

So on 5 March, the card stopped working at AXS. No notice.

Unpopular, but defensible.

Then somebody wrote the FAQ.

"AXS is no longer accepting the Chocolate Debit Card as a credit card payment mechanism."

Read that again. The decision sits with AXS.

AXS did not agree. A spokesperson said otherwise.

"The removal of Chocolate Visa Card as a payment option on AXS was made at the request of Chocolate Finance."

Chocolate rewrote the page. Within hours.

By then it was out. Between 10 and 18 March, more than S$500 million went out.

He was in Switzerland when it started.

When something goes wrong on your watch, how fast does your name get attached to it?